Book Summary: All Grown Up by Jami Attenburg
Andrea, the narrator, is an NYC native, mostly unhappy, confused, cranky girl in her late thirties trying to make sense of her life, living a hazy city lifestyle.
Her dysfunctional family lives in the Upper West Side of the City, where her father, a talented jazz musician, dies of a heroin overdose listening to his favourite record. Her brother, David is very close to her, mostly father their father’s demise. David, for a long time, had been a part of three great bands and a musical influenzer.
We are silent until the song ends. “I’ve got a whole album’s worth,” he says. I experience a temporary moment of both jealousy and awe at my brother’s musical talent, and his ability to tap in so freely to his creative self. But that’s him, he won the family lottery, he got the best part of our father in him.
Her mother has been a political activist for more than thirty years and involved with every possible shade of leftist organization. After the husband’s death, her mother ran out of savings and often had to throw rent-raising dinner parties to make a little extra cash. The audience was not particularly sympathetic rather a bunch of middle-aged gross stoner men which often kept Andrew away from the house. The mother was also very attached to Betsy, the best friend who dies in the later part of the story leaves the mother extremely upset even more than her husband’s demise.
Her brother David and his wife, Greta are two fun-loving characters in the novel who experience a very active and ambitious life until their sick baby, Sigrid was born. They uprooted to the New Hampshire area to take care of their sick child, and rethink their collapsing careers. They are totally broke out of the extreme medical expenses of Sigrid.
The retrospections from her childhood and upbringing often affected Andrea’s romantic and professional experiences as an adult. She wanted to make things all right for her family but her own messy life with endless emotional and mental trauma makes her rethink every decision she makes for her family. Andrea works in an advertising company and struggling to define her own ideas of happiness and security and that it’s okay to stay alone and unmarried.
Each chapter focuses on a particular instance in her life’s journey which is back and forth from her adolescence to adulthood. This story is about this girl and all her experiences about being “THE GROWN UP”
“Is this part of being a grown-up? Taking what you can get?”
Originally published at https://manpabarman.medium.com on July 12, 2021. That account is no longer active.
